Literature’s Arctic Obsession

The greatest writers of the nineteenth century were drawn to the North Pole. What did they hope to find there?

In the nineteenth century, the Arctic, then still largely undiscovered, captured the imagination of the Western world.

Illustration by Emiliano Ponzi

In February of 1880, the whaling ship Hope sailed north from Peterhead, Scotland, and headed for the Arctic. Her crew included a highly regarded captain, an illiterate but gifted first mate, and the usual roster of harpooners, sailors, and able-bodied seamen—but not the intended ship’s surgeon. That gentleman having been unexpectedly called away on family matters, a last-minute substitute was found, in the form of a middling third-year medical student making his maiden voyage: a young man by the name of Arthur Conan Doyle.

Conan Doyle was twenty when he left Peterhead and twenty-one when he returned. On Saturday, May 22nd, in the meticulous diary he kept during that journey, he wrote, “A heavy swell all day. I came of age today. Rather a funny sort of place to do it in, only 600 miles or so from the North Pole.” Funny indeed, for a man who would come to be associated with distinctly un-Arctic environments: the gas-lit glow of Victorian London, the famous chambers at 221B Baker Street, and—further afield, but not much—the gabled manors and foggy moors where Sherlock Holmes tracked bloody footprints and dogs failed to bark in the night.

Shortly after returning from the north, and long before writing any of the stories that made him famous, Conan Doyle told two tales about the Arctic—one fictional, the other putatively true. The first, in 1883, was “The Captain of the Pole-Star,” one of his earliest published short stories. In it, a young medical student serving as the surgeon on a whaling ship watches, first in disbelief and then in dread, as his captain goes mad. Although winter is closing in, the captain sails northward into the Arctic until his ship is stuck fast. Then, obeying a ghostly summons, he walks out alone to his death on the ice.

In addition to launching Conan Doyle’s writing career, “The Captain of the Pole-Star” marked his first contribution to a largely overlooked body of literature: nineteenth-century polar fiction. This unusual subgenre found a kind of epigraph in Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s great cautionary tale in verse, the 1798 “Rime of the Ancient Mariner.” (“The ice was here, the ice was there, / The ice was all around.”) By the end, it included works by many of the greatest writers of the era, or of any era: Mary Shelley, Edgar Allan Poe, Jules Verne, Wilkie Collins, Charles Dickens. Almost invariably, the poles appear in these works as the place where nature reveals its horrifying indifference to humanity; where humanity itself falls away, leaving men to descend into madness and violence; above all, where the dream of universal mastery goes catastrophically awry.

That ominous vision bears virtually no resemblance to Conan Doyle’s second account of the Arctic. The same year that he published “The Captain of the Pole-Star,” he gave a speech at the Portsmouth Literary and Scientific Society, in England, on the subject of polar exploration. This time, the search for the North Pole was “a challenge to human daring,” those who conducted it were men of “indomitable pluck, wonderful self-abnegation, and devotion,” and the Arctic itself was “a training school for all that was high and godlike in man.”

Conan Doyle was not alone in being of two minds about the Arctic. From antiquity onward, our stories about the poles have themselves been polar: either the ends of the earth are precious, glorious, and ours for the taking or they are desolate, unattainable, and deadly. For most of history, both narratives were marginal, as distant from the mainstream of culture as the poles are from the metropole. That changed for the first time at the beginning of the nineteenth century, when the Arctic, then still largely undiscovered, captured the imagination and fuelled the ambition of the Western world.

In the next hundred years, ships setting out from northern nations—and especially, from England—regularly turned their prows toward the Pole. Some of them went, as Conan Doyle’s expedition had, for the whales, a single one of which could fetch more than a quarter of a million dollars in today’s money. Others went in pursuit of the Northwest Passage: a shorter water route between Europe and Asia whose discovery, it was hoped, would dramatically accelerate global trade. Still others went for the glory of obtaining “farthest north”—in contemporaneous parlance, the highest latitude yet reached by man. In all cases, the stories told by those who returned (and, more grimly, the fates, known or unknown, of those who did not) helped create an enormous appetite for polar adventure. Writing in 1853 in Household Words, the popular weekly magazine edited by Charles Dickens, the journalist Henry Morley opined, “There are no tales of risk and enterprise in which we English, men, women, and children, old and young, rich and poor, become interested so completely, as in the tales that come from the North Pole.”

Those beloved tales had begun to ebb from memory by the beginning of the twentieth century, as the Arctic gradually lost its political and cultural stakes. Soon the West turned its attention elsewhere: to industrialization and mass production, to the Great War and the Second World War, to rail and to air and eventually to space, that frontierless frontier. For almost a hundred years, the pull of the polar lands went slack, in life as well as in literature. Only in our own time have stories about the Far North started to matter again, owing to a twist no Victorian reader, writer, or explorer could ever have foreseen.

Sometime around 330 B.C., a Greek geographer and explorer by the name of Pytheas left what is now the city of Marseilles and set sail for the Far North. No one knows exactly what landmass he reached—possibly Iceland, possibly the Faroe Islands, possibly Greenland. Whatever it was, it lay six days north of England and one day south of what Pytheas described (per later Greek geographers; his own writings did not survive) as a frozen ocean, a place that man could “neither sail nor walk.” At a time when Aristotle was still hanging out in the agora, Pytheas had discovered pack ice.

Pytheas called the place he encountered Thule, as in ultima Thule—the land beyond all known lands. That is one of three names the Greeks gave us for the Far North. The second is Arctic, from Arktikos—“of the great bear.” The reference was not to the polar bear, unknown in Europe until the eighteenth century, but to Ursa Major, the most prominent circumpolar constellation in the northern skies.

Whatever the original meaning, “far-away land full of big bears” turned out to be an apt description of the Arctic. But the third name the Greeks bestowed on the north was considerably less accurate—and considerably more important for the future of polar exploration. That name was Hyperborea: the region beyond the kingdom of Boreas, god of the north wind. Somewhere above his frozen domain, the Greeks believed, lay a land of peace and plenty, home to fertile soils, warm breezes, and the oldest, wisest, gentlest race on earth. “Neither disease nor bitter old age is mixed / in their sacred blood,” the poet Pindar wrote of the Hyperboreans in the fifth century B.C. “Far from labor and battle they live.”

Almost from the beginning, that utopian vision of the Arctic shared the stage with a more menacing story, one whose roots lay not in myth but in history. From roughly the second century B.C. to the eleventh century A.D., successive waves of tribes swept out of the north to plunder, kidnap, rape, and murder the native inhabitants of more southerly lands. Even today, the names of those northern tribes spell trouble; we are talking here about Goths, Vikings, and Vandals. Thanks to those marauders, the Arctic in contemporaneous southern legends was not a paradise but a hell. Or the Hell: the Biblical characters Gog and Magog, Satan’s henchmen, hail from the Far North, and the underworld’s inner circle is not a fiery inferno but a frozen lake.

As more explorers ventured into the Arctic, our collective idea of it acquired a few additional details. In 1360, a British friar, returning from the north, reported seeing a tremendous vortex in its farthest waters: a place where the “4 arms of the sea were drawn toward the abyss with such violence that no wind is strong enough to bring vessels back again.” That account eventually made it into the hands of the sixteenth-century cartographer Gerardus Mercator, he of the famous splayed-out map of the world. In his rendering, a huge whirlpool forms the planet’s northernmost extremity. On the basis of other stories, Mercator added the Lodestone Mountain—a huge iron massif at the North Pole, whose magnetic field was supposedly strong enough to pull the nails out of ships and render compasses useless for thousands of miles.

Despite their seeming differences, the magnetic mountain and the terrible maelstrom tell the same basic story about the Arctic. In both, the Far North exhibits an attraction that turns ineluctable, then fatal. But Mercator’s map also included a less obvious feature: the mountain, the maelstrom, and the North Pole were all situated in an open, ice-free sea. This was Hyperborea redux: the Arctic as a balmy haven hidden away at the end of the world.

Reproduced across continents and centuries, Mercator’s map reached generations of cartographers, explorers, historians, statesmen, scholars, writers, and armchair travellers. It was still shaping both our maps and our mental geography in 1852, when one of Mercator’s most influential successors, the German cartographer August Petermann, averred, “It is a well-known fact that there exists to the North of the Siberian coast and, at a comparatively short distance from it, a sea open at all seasons.” By then, the open polar sea was more than just a choice made by mapmakers. It was an article of faith for champions of Arctic exploration, who saw in the ancient fantasy of a paradise beyond the frost its modern incarnation: the dream of a northwest passage.

By the middle of the nineteenth century, in other words, an ancient myth had mutated into a serious scientific hypothesis: the theory of the open polar sea. The most ardent supporters of that theory believed in a kind of Nordic El Dorado. Beyond the eightieth parallel, they held, the ocean was not merely ice-free but actually warm, leading to a kind of tropical paradise—possibly complete with a lost civilization— tucked away at the top of the planet.

More moderate advocates of the theory of the open polar sea, who were also much more numerous, argued that water temperatures reached their nadir at the eightieth parallel and warmed enough above it to keep the Arctic Ocean free of ice. In support of that claim, they cited patterns of bird migration, the direction of ocean currents, the perpetual sunlight of the Arctic summer, the physics of icebergs (which were thought, wrongly, to form only along coastlines), and the existence of slight declivities at the ends of the earth (which, they argued, brought the poles closer to the planet’s molten core, thereby creating regions of unusual warmth). “It may be,” Conan Doyle wrote, in 1884, “that that flattening at the Poles of the earth, which always seemed to my childhood’s imagination to have been caused by the finger and thumb of the Creator, when He held up this little planet before He set it spinning, has a greater influence on climate than we have yet ascribed to them.”

However plausible in the context of contemporaneous science, these arguments were rooted less in geophysical realities than in geopolitical ones. After the Battle of Trafalgar, Britain, though victorious, found itself at sea by virtue of not being at sea. Since at least the Elizabethan era, English identity had been bound up with English seamanship and imperial expansion. Now the nation faced a shortage of available naval battles, a shortage of new places to plant its flag, and—insult added to injury for a sailing nation—the rise of the steamship. The theory of the open polar sea made credible the quest for the Northwest Passage, which, in turn, gave England a new way to assert its naval prowess and its national identity. The single greatest force behind polar exploration, John Barrow, who was appointed Second Secretary of the British Admiralty in 1804 and held the post for forty years, made this symbolic importance explicit. If Britain failed to find the Northwest Passage, he said, she “would be laughed at by all the world.”

These ideological stakes help explain the obsession with polar exploration among the general public, which was wonderfully documented by Francis Spufford in his 1997 book “I May Be Some Time: Ice and the English Imagination.” It is difficult, these days, to appreciate just how deeply everyday citizens of the Victorian era were absorbed in Arctic arcana, how central the otherwise remote poles came to seem. Nineteenth-century Britons sang polar-themed songs, attended polar-themed dinner parties, and flocked to re-creations of polar expeditions staged in the temperate bowers of Vauxhall. And, as Henry Morley observed, they read every polar-themed story they could find. In 1821, Captain William Parry, commander of the second Arctic expedition of the modern era, published a best-selling account of that voyage which propelled him on a book tour of Tom Friedman-like scope and lucre. Thereafter, publishing an expedition journal became as customary for polar explorers as publishing a memoir is for celebrities today. (The British were singularly prone to polar mania, but other nations were not immune. The American explorer Elisha Kent Kane’s 1856 “Arctic Explorations” sold two hundred thousand copies, roughly the equivalent of two million today; when he died, his funeral procession was the second largest in the nineteenth century, bested only by Lincoln’s.)

Of all the renowned explorers of the era, none achieved quite as much fame, at quite so high a cost, as Sir John Franklin, a man destined to cause a crisis in Britain about the meaning of Arctic exploration. In 1845, at the age of fifty-nine, Franklin embarked on his fourth polar expedition with twenty-four officers, a hundred and ten crewmen, and two ships, the Terror and the Erebus. We know today what took England eleven long years to determine. Both ships became trapped in pack ice in the Canadian Arctic. Franklin died on board. His men set off by sledge over the unforgiving Arctic terrain, where they gradually dropped off from scurvy, starvation, and hypothermia. There were no survivors.

To say that the doomed Franklin expedition was the most famous in the history of Arctic exploration fails to do justice to its impact; imagine the disappearance of Malaysia Airlines 370, had it been carrying the World Cup champions. The British Admiralty offered the equivalent of nearly two million dollars for Franklin’s safe return—or, failing that, a million for information about what had happened. In the next decade, inspired partly by that prize money and partly by the general furor in England, thirty-nine separate expeditions set out in search of Franklin and his crew. As rescue missions, none succeeded. (Franklin’s body has never been found; the Erebus and the Terror were only discovered in, respectively, 2014 and 2016.) But in 1854 the widely respected Scottish explorer Dr. John Rae returned from the north with evidence that Franklin’s men were dead, and with an electrifying tale. “From the mutilated state of many of the corpses, and the contents of the kettles,” he wrote, “it is evident that our wretched countrymen had been driven to the last resource.”

Britain immediately went up in arms. Men might die in the Arctic, but their honor and civility were imperishable. Polar exploration was, Henry Morley insisted, “stainless as the Arctic snows, clean to the core as an ice mountain”: all the heroics of colonialism, none of the taint. As the scholar Jen Hill noted in her 2008 book, “White Horizons,” it was bad to sully that story in any way, and unthinkable to impute to the English precisely the moral horror most closely associated with “savages.” Charles Dickens wrote a screed on the allegations that ran to seven thousand words, many of them regrettable. (Among other things, he discounted evidence provided by the Inuit by saying that he “believe[d] every savage to be in his heart covetous, treacherous, and cruel.”) In a debate with Rae, in Household Words, the novelist countered the explorer’s physical evidence and personal experience with, basically, the argument from Britishness: no matter how hungry or desperate an Englishman might get, Dickens claimed, he would never stoop to cannibalism. As a later commentator joked, “Eat a shoe? Yes. Eat a foot? Never.”

Quite aside from its utter lack of empirical support, this was an unlikely argument for someone like Dickens to make. From the moment that politicians first began selling the public on Arctic exploration and defending it as a noble cause that brought forth all that was highest in humankind, novelists had seen the potential for a very different kind of story. The polar fiction they subsequently produced served as id to the era’s ego. In place of conquest, they summoned catastrophe; in place of science, the uncanny; in place of heroism, horror.

Six decades before Arthur Conan Doyle killed the mad commander of the Pole-Star, another writer sent a captain sailing northward, full of hope and Hyperborean convictions:

I try in vain to be persuaded that the pole is the seat of frost and desolation; it ever presents itself to my imagination as the region of beauty and delight. . . . There snow and frost are banished; and, sailing over a calm sea, we may be wafted to a land surpassing in wonders and in beauty every region hitherto discovered on the habitable globe.

The captain continues toward the Pole, ice gradually closing in around him. One morning, he wakes to an astonishing sight: a man on a sledge has been carried on the shifting floes to the side of his ship. After the stranger is rescued, warmed, and fed, he explains how he came to be alone on the Arctic ice. It is an extraordinary story—and one you surely know. The captain’s name is Robert Walton. The man he rescues is Dr. Victor Frankenstein.

In the hundred and ninety-nine years since “Frankenstein” was published, it has never left our consciousness. We eat Frankenfood, track Frankenstorms, laugh at a cartoon Frankenstein monster scaring the daylights out of Scooby-Doo. Yet few people today recall that Mary Shelley’s story begins and ends in the Arctic. Walton goes there to fulfill a dream nurtured since boyhood, when he “read with ardour” accounts of polar expeditions. Frankenstein goes there in pursuit of the monster he created, who flees to the Far North both to escape the cruelty of humanity and to lure his unfaithful creator to an icy death. All of this Frankenstein recounts to Walton, who, in turn, recounts it to us, via a series of letters to his sister back in England.

So the captain narrates the doctor’s tale, at least in part. But he also mirrors it. Like Frankenstein, Walton is driven by scientific arrogance, convinced of “the inestimable benefit which I shall confer on all mankind, to the last generation, by discovering a passage near the pole.” And, like Frankenstein, Walton sees the dream he has so single-mindedly pursued turn deadly. Nine months after he waxes rapturous about the land where “snow and frost are banished,” he writes another letter to his sister: “We are still surrounded by mountains of ice, still in imminent danger of being crushed in their conflict. The cold is excessive, and many of my unfortunate comrades have already found a grave amidst this scene of desolation.”

Shelley was only nineteen when she wrote “Frankenstein,” but she already had a long-standing interest in the poles. As a child, she sneaked downstairs one evening to hear Coleridge recite his “Ancient Mariner”; in her teens, she, too, “read with ardour” accounts of early Arctic voyages. Yet the polar framework in “Frankenstein” was an afterthought; she added it upon reading about John Barrow’s efforts to drum up support for the quest to find the Northwest Passage. To later readers, it can seem arbitrary and tangential, which is why it’s often forgotten. But in Shelley’s time her choice seemed, as it was, deliberate, central, and unmistakably political. Published in 1818, when John Ross had just returned from the first modern expedition to the Arctic and William Parry was gearing up for the next one, the book reminded readers that their world was already full of Dr. Frankensteins.

Shelley’s novel is recognized today as the progenitor of the modern genres of science fiction and horror. But it also helped inspire the wave of polar fiction that followed and establish that canon’s enduring themes. With very few exceptions, later writers used the poles to tell premonitory tales about hubris, irresponsibility, the consequences of meddling with the natural world, and our own ultimate impotence in the face of the forces of nature.

One such writer was Edgar Allan Poe, who resurrected in his tales both the myth of Hyperborea and another ancient Arctic fiction: the maelstrom. The latter appears in two different short stories, “MS. Found in a Bottle” (in which the narrator is catapulted onto a Coleridgean ship drawn inexorably toward the Pole) and “A Descent Into the Maelström” (in which two brothers drown and a third narrowly escapes when their boat is dragged into the vortex). And it shows up, too, in Poe’s only complete novel, “The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket.”

Like many adventure tales of the time, “Pym” begins with an elaborate prologue meant to convince readers that the story to follow is true. In fact, it is outlandish, even by the fervid standards of polar literature. The title character survives mutiny, starvation, exposure, an island massacre, and cannibalism (he does the eating), only to wind up adrift on a polar sea so hyperboreanly hot that it rounds the bend toward Hell. (It is like Poe not to deny the dream but to realize, in both senses, its potentially nightmarish consequences.) In five days, the water temperature rises from “remarkable” to “extreme,” until a “hand could no longer be endured within it.” The book concludes with one of the strangest visions of the polar regions ever summoned. Pym finds himself approaching at breakneck speed a cataract that seems to fall from the heavens, creating below it a whirling abyss in the sea. Just as he is about to be sucked in, he sees “a shrouded human figure,” far larger than any human, with skin “the perfect whiteness of the snow.”

This ambiguous ending displeased Jules Verne, a man who liked to dot his “i”s and cross his “t”s. In his 1897 novel, “An Antarctic Mystery,” he saw fit to emend Poe_,_ rescuing Pym from the boiling sea only to kill him off on a lodestone mountain. Its overwhelming magnetic force yanks Pym from his boat by way of the pistol strapped to his shoulder, propels him through the air, and pins him to its rocky face, where he dies, either upon impact or—as so many real-life polar explorers did—slowly and horribly, of exposure and starvation. Elsewhere, Verne made use of other ancient polar fictions. In “20,000 Leagues Under the Sea,” the mad Captain Nemo is swallowed up by the maelstrom; in “The Adventures of Captain Hatteras,” an obsession with Hyperborea first nearly kills the title character, then drives him insane.

As all this suggests, depictions of the Arctic in nineteenth-century fiction ran a narrow gamut—from, in essence, death by natural causes (hubris, hypothermia, drowning) to death by unnatural causes (ghosts, monsters, magnets, autophagy), give or take madness. A few polar stories, however, were slightly more charitable. In 1857, Wilkie Collins and Charles Dickens collaborated on a play about the Arctic, “The Frozen Deep,” in which a malevolent explorer by the name of Richard Wardour encounters his romantic rival in the Far North and is presented with the opportunity to kill (and, by implication, eat) him. One suspects that he would have done so if it had been left up to Collins, who had no qualms about using the Arctic to dispatch a different wicked suitor in a later novel, “Poor Miss Finch.” But Dickens was still prosecuting the Franklin case in his mind, and so, while the Arctic comes off as a terrible place in “The Frozen Deep,” the play is as much a redemption story as a cautionary tale. It was also a tremendous success; Dickens himself played Wardour in Manchester, London, and before Queen Victoria. (Be that as it may, contemporary readers should beware: it’s written by two of the greatest literary minds of all time, but it’s terrible.)

All this was—to use the apt cliché—the tip of the iceberg. The nineteenth-century obsession with the Arctic intruded even in novels not otherwise concerned with the poles. In Jane Austen’s “Persuasion_,_” Admiral Croft’s wife laments the fact that she had to stay home in Kent while her husband explored the Far North. “Jane Eyre” opens with the title character reading about “the vast sweep of the Arctic Zone, and those forlorn regions of dreary space” where fields of ice “concentrate the multiplied rigours of extreme cold.” (Like Shelley, Charlotte Brontë had been interested in the Arctic since childhood. In the imaginary world she created with her siblings, Anne and Emily adopted the identities of Parry and Ross.) Bram Stoker, who once interviewed Conan Doyle about his time in the Arctic, later sent Dracula to stow away on a Russian schooner crossing the North Sea. By the time the ship arrived in England, its crew—like those of the “Ancient Mariner” and “MS. Found in a Bottle”—was long dead.

These are, of course, just the polar stories by authors we still read today; plenty more were written by those whose names did not endure. Yet, while we continue to venerate the likes of Dickens and Poe and Conan Doyle, we seldom read their Arctic work, or even recollect its existence. This blind spot doesn’t reflect a lack of interest in the region, per se. For some years now, we have been gobbling up polar nonfiction, from biographies of explorers to accounts of disasters. The best of these are superb, and wildly fun to read. But it’s worth remembering, when we choose Shackleton over Shelley, that, in the long history of Arctic literature, the putative nonfiction has seldom offered the most truthful or most useful account of the poles.

“It has certainly been a splendid voyage,” Conan Doyle wrote three weeks into his Arctic adventure. “Beautiful day, wonderfully clear. Icefields, snow white on very dark blue water as far as the eye can reach.” Such uncanny beauty was one of the allures of polar travel. There was, in reality, very little to be found at the Pole by way of triumph or material gain. But one could be exhilarated; one could be moved. Conan Doyle was. To the end of his days, he would sound a rhapsodic note when recalling his time on the Hope, crediting it with everything from launching his literary career to sustaining his lifelong good health.

Yet polar travel was more often dangerous than salubrious—and, on the evidence of his journal, Conan Doyle at sea was not quite so sanguine as Conan Doyle on land. On May 11th, he sums up his situation as “Misery and desolation.” May 25th: “Worser and worserer.” June 2nd: “My hair is coming out and I am getting prematurely aged.” June 13th: “It would make a saint swear.” July 11th: “Got up late and would have liked to have got up later, which is a sad moral state to be in.” July 19th: “Blowing a gale all day. Nothing to do and we did it.” His chief complaint was boredom; his chief fear, that the ship would get trapped in pack ice; his chief danger, falling into the frigid water—which he did four times in his first two days on the ice, jeopardizing his life each time. His crewmates jokingly nicknamed him the Great Northern Diver.

The hazards Conan Doyle faced were the hallmarks of the region. For early explorers, the poles amounted to one long frying pan/fire situation, except at the other end of the thermometer: the water was bad, the ice worse. As regards the water, you could wash overboard and drown, fall off a floe and drown, get dragged into the ocean by a kink in the hurtling line of a harpoon and drown. As for the ice, you could freeze to death on it, starve to death on it, get stranded on it, get lost on it, get frostbite on it, or float away on it. William Parry and twelve of his men once walked northward over ice for thirty-five days, hauling eight hundred pounds of gear, only to discover that the ice itself had been drifting south, nullifying their gains.

Of all the bad things that transpired at the poles, however, what sailors most feared was getting trapped in the ice, partly because it happened so often. At one point in 1830, so many ships were stuck in Greenland’s infamous Melville Bay that almost a thousand men were stranded there. Sometimes an icebound ship thawed out unharmed, leaving its crew merely thinner, colder, and crazier come springtime. At least as often, though, the ship was crushed in the shifting pack ice—“like a grand piano caught in an industrial press,” Barry Lopez wrote in his 1986 book, “Arctic Dreams.” Lopez tells the story of one ship that went down so fast that nineteen men were instantly swept to their death, while the rest were left clinging to what remained of the deck. All but three of them survived, “by bleeding each other and drinking the blood from a shoe.” They were rescued when two Danish brigs were spotted by a man who had abandoned the deck to commit suicide.

This was the reality of polar travel: more ordinary in its awfulness than the gothic horrors conjured up by novelists; more wretched, desperate, and deadly than the stories circulated by the British Admiralty and its publicity machine. Polar exploration wasn’t a leading cause of death in the nineteenth century, but only because so few people participated in it; for those who did, the odds of dying were alarmingly high. Tragically, the novelists were right that much of the death toll was brought about by hubris. As the later Canadian explorer Vilhjalmur Stefansson noted, John Franklin’s entire crew died of starvation and exposure in an area where, for generations, the Inuit had raised their children and tended their elderly. It was possible to live and even thrive in the Arctic—but, steeped in the racial prejudices of colonial England, almost all of Britain’s polar explorers declined to imitate indigenous ways of travelling, hunting, eating, and staying warm. Everywhere else in the former British Empire, English chauvinism led to the death of untold numbers of native people. In the Arctic, English chauvinism led to the death of untold numbers of Englishmen.

Moreover, and contrary to the claims of the day, many of those men died in vain. Most expeditions yielded little in the way of scientific discovery or economic worth, and the great age of polar exploration to which they contributed did not end, as promised, in triumph and glory. Indeed, it can scarcely be said to have ended at all. It simply attenuated in both faith and effort until, by the time its original goals were achieved, they had become both trivial and tarnished. The first Northwest Passage was found by Robert McClure, in 1854, while he was searching for the Franklin Expedition. It passes through Canada’s Viscount Melville Sound—but, as everyone had long since known, travel to and through it was far too dangerous to be commercially viable.

As for the North Pole itself: Frederick Cook claimed to have reached it by sled in 1908, Robert Peary in 1909, Richard Byrd by airplane in 1926. Of all the fictions told about the Arctic, these are among the least plausible. To reach the Pole in the time Peary said he had done so, he would have had to average thirty-eight miles a day, or more than three times faster than the highest proven average ever achieved—and that was by snowmobile. Cook would have needed to average a faintly less unreasonable seventeen miles a day, but the rest of the evidence against him is damning. He had already lied about reaching the summit of Alaska’s Mt. Denali, he failed to record celestial navigations for eighty-eight days of his trip, and he later paid someone to fake the missing data. Byrd’s airplane could not have covered the mileage he claimed in the time allotted, and both he and his pilot later privately confessed to the fraud. The first person to actually reach the North Pole over land was Ralph Plaisted, an insurance agent from Duluth, who arrived on April 20, 1968. Fifteen months later, Apollo 11 landed on the moon.

Of the three polar features on Mercator’s sixteenth-century map—the mountain, the maelstrom, and the open polar sea—only the lodestone mountain turned out to be a myth. (It likely arose from the fact that compass readings grow wildly erratic near the poles.) The maelstrom is real, albeit less dramatic and more southerly: it is the Moskstraumen, off the coast of Norway’s Lofoten archipelago, the largest permanent whirlpool on the planet.

As for Hyperborea, its epistemological status has proved far more equivocal. No tropical paradise has ever flourished at the far end of the world; on the contrary, from long before Pytheas to well after Franklin, some four and a half million square miles of ice spread outward in all directions from the Pole. Around the time that the age of polar exploration ended, however, human-caused atmospheric changes began steadily raising the temperature of the earth. Since then, the chilly Arctic has warmed twice as fast as the rest of the planet, owing to a vicious cycle. Ice, being pale, reflects heat away from itself; the ocean, being dark, absorbs it. As more ice melts, more ocean is exposed. As more ocean is exposed, it absorbs more heat, and the ice in it melts faster.

For the once enormous icescape ringing the North Pole, the results have been dramatic. Since 1980, sea ice in the Arctic has declined thirteen per cent each decade. The Greenland Ice Sheet, which is more than a hundred and ten thousand years old and covers six hundred and sixty thousand square miles of the Far North, has shed two hundred billion tons of water a year since 2003. These changes have already made travel in the region notably easier; in 2007, for the first time in history, a ship navigated through the Northwest Passage without help from an icebreaker. Such travel will only get easier in the future. According to the most recent report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, by the end of our own century the summertime Arctic will be entirely ice-free.

From time to time during the life of our planet, roughly once every half-million years, a curious thing occurs: its geomagnetic field reverses, such that the North Pole and the South Pole swap polarities. Lately, our stories about the poles have done the same. The nineteenth century dreamed of an Arctic that was warm, accessible, and domesticated, but found a remote and frozen region indifferent to human life. Now, in the twenty-first century, as we approach an ice-free, accessible pole that has succumbed to our influence, we dream of a faraway frozen land unspoiled by humankind.

Just before Victor Frankenstein dies, he delivers a speech to Captain Walton’s sailors. They are trapped in the floes of the Far North, and their courage is failing. “This ice is not made of such stuff as your hearts may be,” he tells them. “It is mutable and cannot withstand you if you say that it shall not.” Who knows what our hearts are made of; but the Arctic, unlike the Antarctic, is made only of frozen ocean. Once the ice disappears, there will be nothing there. At that point, if we reach that point, the Pole will become once again what it was long ago: a place we know only through stories. ♦

This article appears in the print edition of the April 24, 2017, issue, with the headline “Polar Expressed.”